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These 10 charities are not living up to their missions. Each spends more than 50% of its budget paying for-profit fundraising professionals to solicit your hard-earned money. They are ranked by the percentage of their total functional expenses spent on professional fundraising fees. As a result, very little of the charity’s spending is directed towards its programs and services.

Malheur County Sheriff’s Office investigators, working with police in Ontario, Nyssa and Payette, posted online ads Dec. 11 through 17 to “known sex trafficking websites,” according to a press release. Eleven men who contacted undercover officers to arrange sexual acts for money were arrested in an Ontario hotel on charges of commercial sexual solicitation. One of the seven Idaho residents arrested also faced a felony charge for possession of methamphetamine. Another man listed a Philadelphia address, while the others were from Malheur County.
Arrested on prostitution charges were three women—ages 36, 25, and 22. The older woman was soliciting alone, but sheriff’s officials said the younger two from Nevada worked for a 34-year-old Las Vegas man who was arrested on a felony charge of compelling prostitution.

The rich landscape of the Skagit Valley captivates the spirit of the Northwest Washington residents who cherish wild coastlines, flourishing farmlands and immense forests. Many who call the rural, open valley home are immersed in a culture of horsemanship and trail riding, hidden from the metropolitan areas within easy driving distance.

“There are around 1,000 riding clubs west of the Cascades,” said Tim Moore, who is staking a claim for the spiritual needs of those who are passionate about horses. “The riding clubs in the area represent 50,000 people, and many have arenas with nice facilities to meet together.”

Between his campaign against President Gerald Ford in 1975-76 and his race against Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan delivered more than 1,000 radio broadcasts. In fact, Mr. Reagan wrote most of those three-minute broadcasts himself. In one broadcast during the Christmas season, Reagan shared a story about Christmas in the Ukraine before and after communism.

As faith leaders, we call on Governor Kate Brown to commute all death sentences in Oregon to life without the possibility of parole. We base this request on shared values, rooted in our religious traditions: compassion, the affirmation of human dignity and respect for all life.

Currently, 35 individuals sit on Oregon’s death row, where the state holds the legal authority to take the life of its prisoners. DNA testing has already exonerated 156 people from death rows across the country, and a motion for DNA testing was filed this month in the case of one death row inmate in our own state.

It maybe the season for peace and good will, but in Medford citizens are in an uproar over anti-Muslim posters throughout the city earlier this month, prompting outrage, charges of racism and pleas for public denunciation. The poster’s creators, a white supremacist organization called American Vangaurd, told local KOBI-News that in addition to a Muslim-free America, “We would prefer to secure and maintain white hegemony in the United States.”

More than a half dozen pastors, ministers and other church leaders Thursday asked the Medford City Council in writing to publicly oppose racism and bigotry.

By Tom KrattenmakerAward-winning Portland-based writerArticle also featured on Huffington Post

I am not a religious person. But that does not mean I must start from scratch in the construction of my governing body of ethics and life’s purpose.

As I scan the pantheon of philosophers, prophets, teachers, artists, moral exemplars, and sages from the ages, one figure stands out for me as particularly promising for our time. He is a figure of unusual wisdom and deeply moving strangeness who calls me to reconceive the orientation of my own life and the manner in which I engage my fellow humans. His story compels me to access my often-reluctant generosity and pull myself out of my self-centered worries and obsessions. This figure’s inspiration has changed the way I treat the supposed nobodies whom I could easily get away with mistreating. His message and manner, I find, address our culture’s maladies and malaises amazingly well, as they do my own.

The Lake Oswego pastor of Christ Church Episcopal who bought a AR-15 gun at a charity raffle in order to destroy it has broken it down and turned it into garden tools. This was the pastors way of speaking out against guns in society. The pastor made further attention at the time because it looked like he violated the gun transfer law recently passed by the Legislature.

None of the three biggest vote getters in the primaries—Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders—are known for their deeply rooted religious convictions. Trump is Presbyterian and Clinton is a Methodist, and like many mainline Protestants, they are religion-lite; Sanders is an admitted secularist. What makes Trump different from Clinton and Sanders is his religion-friendly posture, something the faithful from every religious community can welcome.

There are certain advantages to being religion-lite and religion-friendly at the same time. Having no strong personal stake in the conflict between religious liberty and the rights embroiled in abortion, marriage, education, housing, and healthcare, there is good reason to believe that Trump can be counted on to be religion-friendly.